The Ralationship Between Cognitive Development Of Emotional Display Rules And Understanding Of False Beliefs In4to6Year-old Children

During Ekman and Friesen’s cross-culture study on facial expression, they putforward the concept “emotional display rule” to explain the differences between realfeeling and facial expression. They suggest that emotional display rules are learned earlyin the process of socialization that help children display the emotions of societydesirability, depending on social circumstances. People who have learnt the rules candisplay appropriate emotional responses to a given social situation, regardless of theemotion being felt. At first, many researchers study on cross-culture of emotionaldisplay rule of adult. Then, research centering on display rules of children, andespecially knowledge and understanding of these rules, blossom.Emotional display rule is an advanced stage of emotion understanding, and it is aimportant part of theory of mind. Theory of mind is a person’s reasoning orunderstanding of other’s mental states, and the relationship between behavior andmental states. Researchers usually inspect children’ false belief to know their level oftheory of mind. Understanding of false belief is that one can know that people can holda false belief to predict and explain others’ behavior. People’ understanding of emotionaldisplay rule is based on “false belief”,and people must understand that facial expressionmay cause specter’s false belief. At present, whether the relationship between emotionaldisplay rule and false belief is present,and how emotional display rule is related withfalse belidf are still unclear.Thus,100participants are selected from4to6year-old in our research to explorethe level of false belief、emotional display rules and the relationship between them. Theaim is to reveal the characteristics of emotional display rules and their relationship withfalse belief. The conclusions are as follow:1.The level of understanding first-order false belief increases with age.4to5yearsold is the key age-range which children’s first-order false belief understanding developsquickly.5year old children’s level of first-order false belief is close to maturity.2.The level of understanding second-order false belief increases with age.4to5years old is the key age-range which children’s second-order false belief understandingdevelops quickly. Girls understand it earlier than boys.3.The level of understanding emotional display rule increases with age. Children’semotional display rule understanding develops quickly from4to5year-old, it developsslow from5to6year-old. Girls understand better than boys. There is no significant difference between the understanding of prosocial and self-protective display rules.Children can understand that the character will use some strategies to not display thereal feeling. The frequency of using masking is much more than the frequency of usingminimization and neutralization.4. Prosocial display rules is related with second-order mental-state reasoning,self-protective display rule is closely related with first-order mental-state reasoning.